042: Why Don't "Travelogue" and "Vogue" Rhyme?
First, Tha NEWS.
Hello friends. I'm in North Dakota now. It's That Time of Year. The trip itself was "fine" in that my flights all took off and landed on time and there were no major issues with TSA despite Traveling While Trans. I decided to take one of the super cheap carriers and so I ended up routed through Denver rather than getting a direct flight, but my second leg had a lot of nice space in my row. Honestly, the biggest issue was that I was the only person on my first flight and one of three people on my second and one of six at either airport that was wearing a mask. We're still in the pandemic, folks. Mask up.
Anyway, I'm here now, and it's been rainy and hot and chilly and all the things in between in a single week. Nothing like living in the middle of one of the largest landmasses in the world, hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, sea, or Great Lake. The partner is good. The dog is good. All is well for now, though I'm having some issues readjusting my schedule. I'm sure I'll be comfortable just in time to head back to Chicago.
The kiddo graduated high school a few weeks ago, and they're set on a college path for the time being. It's a very strange accomplishment, as a person who has never really felt like an adult in the way my parents always seemed. But, especially in the last month of the semester, seeing the way said kiddo interacts with others, creates projects and sets them in motion, and has navigated the often unnecessarily complicated world of college application, registration, and funding, I feel like I've done at least a competent job and raising a capable human adult. One that inherits a burning, chaotic world, but capable nonetheless. We'll still need storytellers in the apocalypse.
Speaking of, I can confidently say I'm in the final stretch of the first draft of THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT. I'm waiting for a check on some stuff from an expert, and then I think I have the final epigram to add, which will be coming once I finish reading something that's coming in CONSUMPTION below. And that's it. Three years of writing. But then. I don't know what I'm going to do in regards to a citations and notes section. TS Eliot famously added a notes section to "The Waste Land" that actually confused more people than it helped. Jack Spicer wrote an entire book with footnotes on each page, again, often more confusing than educational. My friend Yarrow added a notes section to DEATH AND that was effectively an annotated bibliography without the bibliography part. I do know that I'm going to be adding something. I can't just leave an entire hodgepodge of citations and allusions and references without some kind of acknowledgement. Have you ever read Jonathan Letham's "The Ecstacy of Influence?" It's a response of sorts to Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence but also to the fairly incomplete conversations we have about plagiarism in creative work. Letham's essay is almost wholly comprised of words of others, without in-line citations like a dissertation or report might have, without footnotes or any indication at all that the words are those of anyone but him. And yet, the combination itself is novel, flows, and--most importantly, it is a statement on the concept of theft as art.
This is not to say that THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT is not an original work, but it does contain a major sampling of others' direct words, forms created by others, medidations on existing work, discussions of subjects too big to use as metaphor still used as metaphor, and so on. And the problem is that this sort of documentation is necessary to the work, I think. It's a full-length book of poetry, with an arc, and the whole point is the connections within it, without making it a full-on digital hypertext. So that's going to need to be addressed. Not to mention the revision process, or even how I'm planning on publishing or distributing the dang thing, which I still haven't decided on.
Yesterday was my six-year anniversary of starting HRT, which is where I formally start counting my transition, despite beginning to change my wardrobe over several years earlier. The fact that I'm winding down THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT while percolating another idea for a major work seems meaningful in that context. I'm not sure in what way. Meaningful, though.
In other transitional news, the podcast has moved into summer hiatus. We're still working on it, of course, but summer is our preproduction season where we adjust workflows, talk about what we'd like to accomplish for the next season, see what guests we have on deck and who we'd like to get, and so on. The last episode for season two covers all that, and is my first solo episode, where I talk about some of the other behind-the-scenes stuff. You're welcome to check it out here, or you can find Hoorf Podcast on your favorite podcast place.
Finally, one other thing I'm hoping to do while I'm here is recording the audiobook version of confessions from a drainage ditch. I don't know if I'll have time, but I should be able to at least get a handle on best practices for the industry.
Second, INTERLUDE.
Dylan’s originality and his appropriations are as one.
The same might be said of all art.
Third, CONSUMPTION.
Picked up the new St. Vincent album, All Born Screaming, just as I said I would. I don't know that this one was what I was expecting at all. It feels a bit like Strange Mercy to me, in that it's heavy and catchy, but not, like, poppy-catchy like STV and MASSEDUCTION were. I was expecting this to be the one where Annie went full industrial, especially given the promo singles. But it's not. It's just... very, very good. I think it might be a little reactionary as compared to Daddy's Home, as well, since that album was propped up by a lot of guitar, and this one... isn't. Like of course it's still there, she's a trained jazz guitarist, but it's not as front-and-center as some of her other releases. I'm still going to listen a bunch more times by the end of the year, I'm sure.
Also got the most recent Florence + the Machine, finally, Dance Fever. It's been out a while now, but I finally, finally picked it up on vinyl. It's an absolutely gorgeous package, and the album itself is long enough to take up three sides of a double-vinyl set, with the fourth side being a very nice art etching. It's still one of my favorite records of the past... ten? years, and the packaging just adds so much to the overall design of the release.
Finished Cybernetics the other night. I cannot overstate the influence this book has had on the world since it was published. I'd also be lying if I said I read the "whole" thing. I skipped over several pages of math. Not because I'm bad at math, just that I find it very boring. Also Wiener did a remarkable job of summarizing in words what he'd just covered in mathematics. Regardless, there are a number of issues surrounding communications, computing, and AI that we still haven't fully grappled with in the 70-ish years since its publication. I also ended up doing a blackout poem of a paragraph for THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT. So that's fun.
Started on my friend Damien Patrick Williams' dissertation, Belief, Values, Bias, and Agency: Development of and Entanglement with "Artificial Intelligence", which is the thing I'd mentioned above as having the closing epigram for THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT. I'm through Chapter 1, "Of Djinn, Digital Angels, and Dominant Logics". Hopefully I'll have it done by the end of the week, we'll see.
Before I'd left Chicago, the spouse and I made a trip to the annual Buddhist Temple Book Sale, which benefits the Temple's aid to the homeless in the city. While there, I picked up Anne Carson's If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. I have not read any Sappho at any length at all, but what's a hopelessly gay poet like myself gonna do, not buy all of Sappho's fragments for $2? (I also grabbed a Wittgenstein piece and Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins, which is one of my favorite childhood books despite not being Jewish.)
Been watching a lot of Jeopardy! Partner's fam has been recording it since the days of Betamax. So we're catching up on some of the Tournament of Champions stuff from last season. Great fun, many answers in the form of questions.
One of my favorite projects of the past decade has a new Kickstarter going. Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie and Matt Wilson created an amazing narrative and design blueprint that’s still fucking my brain up to this day. And Katie West is an incredible editor, so. Go support a pile of great artists and a super cool prject.
Fourth, HUSTLE.
First and foremost is my most recent book, confessions from a drainage ditch, which was released on Sept 1st through Amazon, and is available in ebook and paperback formats. If you haven't picked it up, it's a great introduction to my more concrete and mainstream work.
If you're looking for something weirder, you can check out A Void and Cloudless Sky, a chapbook, which is also available from Amazon, as well as most other retailers. By being a subscriber to this newsletter, you're also entitled to a free PDF version, which you can get here.
If you're liking this whole project and want to support it directly, here is my Patreon. There are lots of little benefits you can get there, from poems written to your specifications to subscriber-only limited-edition chapbooks.
Finally, THE OUTRO.
I don't need to tell you that there is a massive humanitarian (and human) crisis going on in Gaza. But if you're looking for a real and tangible way to help the people trying to survive or escape the horrors of genocide, Gaza Funds is a fantastic way to help. I understand that it's overwhelming to see so many hundreds of people looking for help... but this is just a small fraction of those affected, and these are the ones you can most directly help quickly.
The next best thing you can do is reach out to your representatives at the federal level. Congress has an online lookup tool where you can find your representatives and senators and how you can email or call them. Tell them to stop funding Israel's horrific campaign.
As for you? Rest. Know you are doing as much as you can in the world you inhabit. I know that it's hard to feel hopeful in a world that's on fire in so many literal and figurative ways, but our immediate sphere of influence is all we are really able to affect. So do what you can. It's enough. I promise. See you again soon.